Naiʻa Ulumaimalu Lewis · Hawaiʻi Nei Pae ʻĀina
Decoding our creative inheritance.
An artist and systems thinker. I design for coherence, translating between culture, community, and the natural world.
An artist and systems thinker. I design for coherence, translating between culture, community, and the natural world.
Honolulu, Hawaiʻi
I am Naiʻa — an artist, change-holder, teacher, and writer based in Honolulu with more than thirty years of practice across art, education, communications, facilitation, and guardianship of the natural world.
As an intergenerational mentor and creative midwife, I work with individuals and groups ready to transform how they work, communicate, value time, manifest their ambitions, and invest in community. I draw on decades of public and private sector experience and on walking my own spiritual path.
I am a multi-media-maker: illustration, digital art, graphic design, watercolors, paper murals, writing, poetry, and podcasting. My Mosaic Mural Process is a collaborative art-driven methodology I use with individuals and teams to build connection and shared vision.
I am the founder of Salted Logic, an Indigenous women-owned media collective based in Honolulu, and the founder of Studio Wā, which is now home to all of my interests concerning temporal frameworks, the movement of celestial bodies, and my suite of materials around lunar productivity and learning called iMahina.
Mentorship and creative midwifery across generations, one-on-one and in small groups.
Illustration, digital art, graphic design, watercolors, paper murals, writing, poetry, and podcasting.
Salted Logic, an Indigenous women-owned media collective, Studio Wā, and iMahina.
Every mark begins as ink and pigment on paper. The same illustrations carry the duotone surfaces of this site, and the studio next door.
Drag or scroll the strip.
The Mosaic Mural Process is an art-based collaborative methodology I use with individuals and teams. A single image is divided among many people, drawn panel by panel, then assembled into one work. It builds connection and shared vision, and it leaves something lasting behind.
Murals can be commissioned for a group, an organization, or a place.
Alongside the murals, I take commissions for individual pieces, working in digital art, watercolor, pencil, and ink. Braiding Sweetgrass and Nānā Pono were made for the Omidyar Foundation.
Necessary Labor is a growing body of writing on culture, time, and the labor of making meaning. It crosses over with Studio Wā, where the same questions take an institutional shape. A podcast and a newsletter are in development, the beginning of a small ecosystem rather than another set of channels to feed.
Be the first to know when the podcast and newsletter are live.
The living memos, a shared thread of writing with Studio Wā, live on the studio site.
I have never called myself a conservationist, though the ocean has been my work for twenty years. I am a practitioner of the things across this page, and I turned that skill set toward the sea. My role was to be a bridge: to make sure community took part in the work, and that culture had an advocate inside it.
It began in 2005. For nearly a decade I served on the team for Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, and in those years I was part of the collective that designed and built Big Ocean, a network of the world's largest marine managed areas. I began as its coordinator and have served as its executive director since 2020.
This is where I learned the human dimensions of conservation: how whole communities hold their relationship to place, and how Indigenous knowledge shapes the way the vast spaces of the open ocean are cared for and governed. I had the honor of leading the IUCN Protected Planet guidelines for large-scale marine managed areas, written with a group of colleagues I deeply admire.
I am beginning to step back from this work. The relationships it gave me stay with me, and the fuller record lives on my LinkedIn.
If you're interested in working with me, reach out. We can set up a free 20-minute discovery call.
I come from a lineage of firstborn daughters four generations long.